The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Today's enterprise-level programming environments offer access to thousands of libraries, classes, and services that are regularly updated, replaced, and deprecated. In computer software standards and documentation, the term deprecated is applied to software features that are superseded and should be avoided. Currently, these environments contain limited means to notify developers that they are using deprecated services, which makes the transition to a new version of an application programming interface (API) error prone and difficult. It is also unclear to users how long a deprecated service will remain supported and whether it can safely be used.
In the Java™ programming language, identifying deprecated classes requires a developer to read the Javadoc™ documentation. The maintainer of the class library must also manually update the documentation in order to communicate to the developers whenever a class is deprecated. The developer of a computing application must then perform any required changes manually if functionality being used in the application may no longer be available or compatible. This manual method also does not identify any information about when a class may be deprecated in the future or when a deprecated class will be removed altogether. Unless a developer learns from an outside source that a class is being deprecated, he or she may not learn of the deprecation until the day it happens in a version update.